De la verdad como invención a la materialidad del poder. Desplazamientos del pensar de Nietzsche a Foucault

Abstract

From the Genealogy of Morals and other aspects of Western culture, Nietzsche shows the link between his diagnosis of nihilism and his critique of the traditional notion of truth. I define Nietzsche’s conception of truth as perspectivistic, because there are no absolute but situated and contingent truths, constructed and emerging from the eventful struggle between wills to power that create and recreate the world. In Nietzsche’s legacy, Foucault is concerned with the question the truth that has operated as a desire for truth in Western history. In this sense, it goes beyond the “application” of a genealogy of the truths held in the West, to remove the various mechanisms operative in shaping social practices, knowledge and modes of subjectivity. In this paper, I try to show a shift in the thinking of Nietzsche to Foucault: the one that starts with a Nietzschean’s understanding of the world as fi ction and truth as invention and which leads Foucault to the study of concrete materiality of power devices and arrays of truth in history, from which certain modes of subjectivity emerge.